Blood on Their Hands (Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics)

by Brendan DuBois

  “And now,” Claudia continued with relentless momentum, “we want to discuss some new concerns about library safety. As you know, Lakeland is an elderly library, and because of budgetary constraints, needed repairs have been shamefully neglected.”

  George knew all about budgetary restraints. He’d met with the Board of Governors just last week, and although he’d pleaded for more money, none had been forthcoming. Indeed, the bond issue in November had failed; the library would simply have to make do with funding at last year’s level. George doubted he merited the confidence the Board had placed in him. With automatic cost-of-living salary increases and the price of magazines and newspapers spiraling out of control, he was at his wit’s end. Even if he fired that good-for-nothing gaggle of Madonna wannabees who shelved the books with all the speed of molasses in January, he’d save only enough to buy a one-year subscription to Science Citation Index. It was discouraging.

  “Nevertheless,” Claudia forged on, “we must address some safety issues.”

  “Which are?” George inquired.

  Claudia raised an index finger. “One. The dumbwaiter. It doesn’t work half the time. Yesterday I looked up the shaft to see what was holding it up and nearly got decapitated when it suddenly decided to come down.’’

  George suppressed a smile. If that happened, Claudia’s mouth would go on flapping a full ten minutes after her head had parted company with her body. He nodded sagely, his fingers tented over his lips.

  “Two. The compact shelving. The hand cranks are stiff and difficult for our older staff to manage.” Claudia braved a sideways glance at Belinda. “Nowadays, they’re electric,” she added, as if George had just emerged, dazed and blinking, from a time machine sent from the seventeenth century. “With automatic shutoff controls. I shudder to think what would happen if someone was reaching for the Bryant Papers when somebody else decided to check out the World War II correspondence.”

  Myles, who had until this point been mindlessly tracing the lifeline on his palm with a ballpoint pen, raised both hands in front of his face and brought them sharply together. “Splat!”

  Belinda glared at him from across the table. “Not funny, Myles.” Myles shrugged and returned to his doodling.

  “Three.” Claudia soldiered on, like a suffragette on a mission. “We’ve got to get rid of the halon.”

  “Why?” George inquired. “It’s the most effective fire retardant ever invented. And since it’s a gas, it doesn’t ruin the manuscripts as water would.”

  “True,” Claudia admitted, “But it does deplete the ozone layer.”

  “Like freon,” Jean added.

  All around the table, George’s staff nodded sagely. Good God almighty! He was captaining a Greenpeace vessel. “But surely...” he began, until Claudia raised a caterpillar-like eyebrow.

  “No choice, I’m afraid. Halon gas hasn’t been manufactured since 1994, and in 2003 it will be banned altogether.”

  With fat, ringless fingers, she started a three-page Internet printout on a circuit around the table. When it reached George, everybody waited silently while he scanned the document. Indeed, halon was being phased out in favor of an alphabet of substances like FM200 and ETEC Agent A, but it was the price tag that caught his eye. If he handed over his entire salary for a year, it would just about cover the cost of a retrofit.

  “Besides, it sucks all the oxygen out of the air,” Jean commented. “What if there was a fire, and Belinda was working in the vault when the halon went off?”

  Myles threw his head back, eyelids fluttering grotesquely over the whites of his eyes and gurgled like a clogged drain.

  “Nonsense!” George scoffed. “There are safeguards.” Although he didn’t have the vaguest idea what they might be. “Let me study the issue and get back to you. Anything else?” His question met a wall of silence. “Good. Back to work, then.”

  George stood, shook the kinks out of his calves, and concentrated on shoving papers back into his folder. When he glanced up again, everyone had gone except Belinda. “Dr. Hopkins?”

  “Yes, Belinda?”

  “I was wondering if you’d reconsider your decision about my request for leave without pay.”

  George stared. “I thought we’d settled that.”

  “Well, I consulted the city employees’ manual, like you suggested just now, and it clearly states that leave without pay may be granted under certain circumstances.” A button dangled from her cardigan by a thin thread and she twisted it round and round. “I met a clerk at the court house yesterday who’s on three months’ leave just to study for her bar exam!”

  George tucked his folder under his arm. “If you had read those regulations carefully, Miss D’Arcy, you’d have seen that such leave is granted at supervisor discretion. If I let you go for so long a time, it’s as good as announcing to the Board of Governors that I don’t really need an archivist.”

  A tear slid down Belinda D’Arcy’s cheek and made a dark splotch on her lime green blouse. “My mother has Alzheimer’s, Dr. Hopkins.”

  “So you said.” George leaned against the doorframe. “Look, I don’t wish to appear uncompromising and hardhearted, but I have a library to run, Miss D’Arcy. Surely there are, uh, arrangements you can make. Adult day care? Hospice? A nursing home? We certainly pay you enough.” Belinda turned and fled.

  George stooped to pick up the button that had fallen from the archivist’s sweater. “Wait! You’ve lost your button!” But the door to the corridor slammed, and Belinda was gone.

  George spent the next week glued to the chair in front of his computer, plugging new figures into his Excel spreadsheet, moving them about from column to column like some elaborate chess game. If he put off the new photocopier acquisition until next year, he discovered, the dumbwaiter could be fixed, but replacing the compact shelving and the halon system that protected the manuscript vault was simply out of the question, either now or in the foreseeable future.

  Late one afternoon, with the cleaning staff busily emptying trash baskets nearby, George determined that the cranks on the compact shelving units did work a bit stiffly, but nothing that a little WD-40 couldn’t fix. He worked the lubricant well into the crank mechanisms at the end of each row of shelves, then, beginning with the section where the atlases were kept, he knelt and began spraying WD-40 on the tracks that ran along the floor. He was so intent on his task that it took him a while to notice that the shelves were closing in on him. “Hey!” he shouted over the drone of the vacuum cleaner. “Someone’s in here!” But the gap continued to narrow.

  George scrambled to his feet and braced his arms, Sampson-like, against the shelves. “Hey!” he shouted again, feeling the flab on his upper arms quiver ineffectually beneath his sleeves. “Hey! Hey!”

  It was an oversize Atlas of the World: 1750, Volume IV that saved him when he managed to wedge it into the narrowing gap between the shelves. Underarms ringed with sweat, he stepped over the blessed book and peeked out into the room. “Who’s there?”

  But he saw no one. Even the cleaning crew had vanished.

  Later, relaxing at home with a cold glass of Chablis, his blood pressure and heart rate returned to normal, George almost succeeded in convincing himself that it was one of the cleaning crew who had moved the shelves, but was simply too frightened to admit it. Yet a feeling of uneasiness hung about him like a cloud, and for the next couple of days, he rarely left his office.

  Until Belinda D’Arcy called. “Please come down to the manuscript vault, Dr. Hopkins. I have something to show you.”

  George laid aside his Publishers Weekly and sighed. It had been a fine, sunny day. He had eaten lunch at a picnic table in the park. Later, his mother had telephoned to say that she was not coming for Christmas this year. Yes, a near perfect day. The last thing in the world George wanted to do was spoil it by talking to Belinda D’Arcy. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I’ll have
to show you.”

  George checked his watch. “Okay. If it’s that important, I’ll try to stop by on my way home.”

  In the next few minutes while George packed up his briefcase, locked his office door, and caught the elevator to the archives on Sublevel A, he wondered what was bothering the archivist this time. A dead rat, probably. Or a bit of condensation on the pipes.

  He found Belinda waiting for him in the spacious vault, standing behind one of two long, narrow study tables, her plain face unflatteringly sallow under the bright fluorescent lights. “What did you decide about the halon?” she asked.

  “We’ll need new cylinders, pipework, and nozzles,” George explained. “I’m putting them into the five-year plan.”

  “But it’s dangerous now,” Belinda complained, moving between George and the door.

  “Look,” George snapped. “I’ve studied the installation carefully. I’ve read the manual. Even if halon should suddenly fill this room, it would last only ten seconds.” He pointed to a gridded opening near the floor. “After that, those big exhaust fans kick in and suck it all out. Nobody’s in danger.”

  “Really.” It was a statement, not a question. “I’ve left a report on the table,” she said. “I suggest you read it.”

  Before he could reply, Belinda slipped out the door and slammed it shut behind her.

  At first, George wasn’t alarmed. It wasn’t the first time Belinda had stormed out of a meeting; for someone in her sixties, she was surprisingly immature.

  The room was scrupulously neat, so it didn’t take him long to find the folder where she had left it for him, on the table farthest from the door. He skimmed over the report—something with an official-looking logo from a firm called Foggo, Inc.—but it didn’t seem to contain anything he didn’t already know.

  He put the report down and went to the door, but the damned woman had slammed it so hard that it was jammed. “Belinda?” Feeling foolish, he pounded against the door with his fist. “Belinda!”

  Her voice was soft, and surprisingly close, just on the other side of the door. “I suggest you read the small print, Dr. Hopkins.”

  The woman has lost her marbles! George was caught up in some sort of macabre game, and if he wanted to get home tonight in time to feed the cat, the only thing he could do was play along.

  He grabbed the report and flipped through it again, noticing for the first time where someone—probably Belinda—had highlighted a footnote with yellow marker:

  Caution. Do not place boxes, papers, or other objects on shelves or tables near the nozzles, as they will be blown off by the extremely high velocities created by the gas shooting from the tanks. To minimize this potential hazard, install pegboard sheets at the ends of shelving units near the nozzles in order to allow penetration, but deflect the blast. Ceiling panels must be secured...

  George felt his face grow hot; blood pounded in his ears. He glanced quickly around the room. No pegboard sheets. Boxes all over the shelves. And how the hell was he supposed to know how the ceiling panels were secured.

  “And by the way, George,” he heard Belinda say. “I think I smell smoke!”

  George’s stomach lurched. “Belinda! Open the door!”

  “Fire, fire, fire!” she singsonged.

  George knew the klaxon would be loud, but he was totally unprepared for the ear-splitting sound of the halon being discharged. It exploded from vents all around him, knocking the boxes off their shelves, sending their contents—manuscripts and letters and antique photographs— swirling about the room in a furious hurricane. Floor tiles erupted from their framework grid, narrowly missing his head as they shot toward the ceiling. All around him, the air shimmered as halon mixed with the oxygen in it.

  Ten seconds? It seemed to George like ten years.

  A tile flew up, striking a shelf, which tilted. A bronze bust of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry teetered on the edge, then toppled, falling on an aquatint of the barge Seneca Chief, dated 1825, shattering the glass. A glistening shard spun through the air, sliced through his collar, and severed his jugular.

  By the time the exhaust fans kicked in, George was already dead.

  No Man’s Land

  Elizabeth Foxwell

  In the gray queue of ambulances, I slumped against the painted red cross, smoking the latest in a series of gaspers. In the distance, the guns boomed their incessant thunder, yellow bursts flashing ominously along the darkening horizon. This French countryside should have been quaintly bucolic with green grass and woolly sheep instead of ripped asunder, the long rows of trenches and barbed wire plowed remorselessly into the earth. Around the cigarette, my chapped fingers shook.

  “Ta ra, Knox.” It was my rangy Australian bunkmate, calling from the depot door. “Long run?”

  I coughed, watching the cigarette smoke snake upward like a ghost in the mist. “Heaps of casualties plus two cases of spotted fever—and that blasted marker for Hospital Number Eight’s turnoff has gone missing again.”

  “Dinky die. Almost slid into a ditch with my lot. Sodding mud. If I was a rum driver like—”

  Involuntarily, our eyes traveled to the sagging ambulance at the end of the queue—all ugly twisted metal and smashed windscreen. Aussie’s habitual scowl softened.

  “Don’t tear yourself up, Knox. She’s gone, and good luck to her.” She jerked a grubby thumb at a handsome staff car and the two tall, uniformed Tommies polishing its bonnet. “And now the Pommie brass are nosin’ around with their fool questions. Bugger it. Little Turnip’s a better sight off.” She scraped her boots on the step. “We saved you some cocoa and stale biscuits. A sweet offer and no mistake. Come out of this damp.’’

  “In a moment.’’

  “Some happy new year, eh. Nineteen bloody sixteen.” She glared toward the thumping distance. “Bloody guns.” With a snort, she dove inside, the warped door as usual failing to completely close.

  I should heed her advice, choke down lukewarm cocoa and hard biscuits, talk to the other girls, snatch at sleep on the narrow camp bed in the guise of a normal human being. It was difficult to be normal after the daily scrubbing out of my bus with its blood and vomit from soldiers mangled by shrapnel; hard to blot out the sobs of pain, the stench of gangrene and decay. The fortunate ones died before the hospital door, escaping the ordeal of amputation or the hemorrhaging of lungs from gas or the prospect of an alien and uncomprehending home front.

  Others died instantly, shot through the head by a sniper...

  I inhaled the blessed, steadying smoke deeply. Such was the work expected of middle- and upper-class women, bred for perfect marriages, idyllic motherhood, and the laundering of the battlefield.

  Through the cracked door, the murmur of voices rose and fell.

  “Was her ambulance in good order?” An older male voice, gruff and official.

  “Certainly. Part of our duties, maintenance. Most likely she skidded in the snow. The ice can be fearful,” said Finn, one of the other drivers.

  “Could have been a tire,” suggested another girl, Blake. “We puncture all the time. Did anyone look at the tires?”

  “Of course, you twit,” snapped Finn. “The left front is as flat as a board. But she smashed into the tree—it could have punctured before, during, after—it’s anyone’s guess.”

  “Perhaps,” answered the gruff voice. “Or someone tampered with her brakes.”

  “Rubbish,” returned our firm commandant. “Forgive me, General Ravenswood, but you wouldn’t say such things if you were stationed here. This place is like Paddington Station. Who would have the opportunity?”

  One of us, I thought. That’s what was in the general’s mind. One of us could mess about with Turnip’s ambulance without challenge, and spout something about assisting an exhausted friend. My resentment rose. In the grayest dawn and the blackest night, we drivers depended upon each other—was that trust to be destroyed by misdirected military inquiry?

  “Another driver, Commandant,” replied Finn, expres
sing my thoughts.

  Aussie said a rude word.

  “I have to agree with the sentiment of our Colonial cousin, if not her language,” said the commandant. “My girls work hard, General, and don’t merit idle accusations.”

  “No one is accusing anyone.”

  “Too right,” said Aussie with scorn. “No sense to it. Can’t see us fighting over Turnip’s sparklers, or swish kit, or battalion of beaus—if they existed. The poor blighters are bleeding too much to paw us about.”

  “Not all of the men in France are wounded.”

  “We drive during the day,” said Blake, “and are called out at night for the convoys. When we’re not driving, we’re usually asleep. Alone,” she added with a gulp and probably a blush.

  “The rules are quite clear about fraternization,” noted the commandant, and I wondered if Blake was now the shade of a ripe tomato.

  The general tried another tack. “May I ask where you all were when the incident occurred?”

  “Oh, I see.” Finn again, patrician and cool. “Gather the suspects into one room and someone will break down and confess?”

  “I have to ask the question, Miss Finlay.”

  “If you must,” said Finn. “Very well—we were on duty. At the time Turnip had gone west, I was driving a boy with pneumonia, two poilus with reeking cases of trench foot, and a Scottish sergeant with a terrific chest wound to Number Eleven. I’m sure they can vouch for me—if they were conscious, that is.”

  “I was transporting a doctor and a nurse,” said Aussie. “From hospital to casualty clearing station and every aid station in between. Of course, I could have gone walkabout between appointments, but the Doc would hardly wear it.”

  Blake was reported at No. 24—although longer than she should have been—and the other girls were either at the railway station or en route to one of the other hospitals.